Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Rose Hill Campus Gets New Data Center

The Rose Hill Data Center, which hosts everything from online course catalogues to payment records and transcripts at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, has been given a major upgrade.

The center, which until recently was housed in Dealy Hall, has been augmented with several new features that will safeguard the University’s most sensitive information. The upgrade, which began in January 2009, greatly improves both redundancy and efficiency, resulting in an environmentally-friendly system with enhanced risk management capability.

“We were fortunate to take on this project at an advantageous point in time for a much needed facilities upgrade,” said Frank Sirianni, Ph.D., Vice President and Chief Information Officer. “As a result, we now have first-rate data centers on both campuses that will ensure business continuity in our records, not to mention the day to day University operations. Additionally, it provides us with complete certitude in the unfortunate event of a catastrophe.”

For increased efficiency, the Rose Hill data center contains a hot aisle containment system that regulates temperature in each server row within the facility.This is a 30% more efficient cooling scenario than the industry in-row cooling technology standard, and replaces an outdated system that relied on computer room air conditioner cooling units to control the air temperature throughout the room.

The center, whose exact location is being withheld by request of the Fordham Information Technology Department, also features 2N redundancy, which means there is a backup for every critical piece of power and cooling control within the structure.

In the event that there is a loss of public utility power in the surrounding area that results in an outage on campus, an on site generator will ensures that the data center continues to operate at full capacity. The redundancy extends to the data stored there and at a counterpart at the Lincoln Center campus as well.

All data and related systems will be transferred from Dealy Hall to the new location in advance of the Spring 2010 semester.